Sweet Misery
by Rainsong
Summary: Sometimes love can be the sweetest of misery. Feelings between Lily and Sirius are remembered in a series of flashbacks. Sirius POV.


Sweet Misery

By Rainsong

A/N: I've been on hiatus for some time, unfortunately due to a cross between massive amounts of schoolwork and a bout of writer's block. But, being on spring break, my load as been lightened a bit and I had some time to sit down and gather some inspiration. So, taking up the proverbial quill once more, I present my first (but certainly not last!) Lily/Sirius fanfic. It's a ship that I vowed time and time again I would not take interest in, but lately I've been completely consumed by it. If this seems squicky to you, read no further. Or better yet, read on and see if I can change your mind. Review, also, though if you're only doing so to flame me, I recommend channeling your boredom into something more constructive. PG-13 for themes and some rather adult behavior. Nothing graphic, of course. 

Dedicated to Leiha, who has not only seen the Light, but has become the ever-reigning Queen of Avocados and Sex Gods in the process.

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            People rarely remember what will only ail them. Perhaps that's why history is so often forgotten; it's not exactly pleasant, is it? Sometimes we cast away certain things so completely that naturally we're doomed to repeat them. Love can be that way. Of course, love is never truly forgotten, I suppose that's why I could never forget her. 

            If it was all in moments of misery, than I have never known misery so sweet. Though there were few times when we were ever truly happy. We simply forgot. Forgot about the darkness that nearly consumed us, the war that raged outside. The world could end and we wouldn't have heard it. Perhaps that was the point of all of this. 

            Back then we were warriors. Not our chosen path, mind you. From the first day, we were told that our destiny was of more importance than what we were leaving behind. And God, did we leave behind everything. But after five tiresome years, there was not much to go back to. Most of what we had cherished was dead, and if not dead, lost in some other irreconcilable way. And all of this for a destiny that we did not yet understand. Of course, now I understand hers. 

She had to save the world.

            When Voldemort fell, I remember hearing Harry's name shouted through the streets. "He's vanquished He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named! God bless him!" as though he had fought and toiled for his triumph. Don't get me wrong; I love the boy dearly. He's all I have left of both of them. But I remember, as I wandered aimlessly, searching, I wondered why they hadn't toasted _her_ name. It was her gift, that love that was too strong for Voldemort. I'm sure no one had any idea, of course. I only understood because I remembered a brief passage on it in a book I had to read for school. Yet it pained me to think that her sacrifice had been so overwritten by joy. Like I said before, people like to forget. But I digress.

             I have nothing to apologize for. There was an unspoken understanding between us. There were times when just sitting in silence was so valuable, or laughing over something petty that happened earlier that day. Those were the times when we were golden. And if not in happiness, we were so often together in sorrow. Those last few years gave us little to celebrate.

            I remember Christmas holiday in seventh year. James had gone home, wanting to check up on his family. I had stayed, as usual. She had as well, because her family was going to be on business in Japan from mid-December until a few days after Christmas. And, she had added, laughing, "I'd have to be mad to leave you here to your own devices." She was probably right. Not many students stay over Christmas holiday, I'd be alone with the professors. But I still believe to this day it must have been better than what I would have faced at home.

            I was walking towards the common room one night, having been raiding the kitchen for dessert. I happened to meet Professor McGonagall in the corridor. My breath caught in my throat, knowing that I'd be punished. I was out passed curfew, in the kitchens no less. But she only stared, stared in a strange sort of way. She looked at me as though I had sped up a process she had never wanted to begin, an indescribable sadness about her. This was horribly out of character, so much so that it gave me chills.

            "I'm so sorry," she half-whispered. "He came only hours ago for him. There was no way anyone could have foreseen it." 

            I felt my stomach lurch. _James. Something had happened to James, Voldemort knew that he had left Hogwarts._ She must have noticed the shock on my face. 

            "I just don't understand. Your father.. how could he have had anything to do with all of this?" she said, incredulously. 

            And then I understood. Voldemort had gone after my father. Killed him. I exhaled, feeling a sick sense of relief. McGonagall looked confused, though I suppose that was because she had never met my father. 

            "There's more," she said heavily. "It wasn't only your father that was killed. You-Know-Who went to Miss Evans' home too. Her poor parents…her sister was out at the time, she escaped the attack." 

            I felt my eyes shift out of focus, looking at nothing in particular. Lily's parents. Possibly the kindest people I'd ever met, next to James' parents. They were only Muggles; they had nothing to do with the war. I doubt Lily had even told them about it. And yet he came for them. I knew, of course, why. Voldemort was trying to frighten us. He wanted us to pull out of this battle, to abandon each other. And this was the best way his mind could construe.  

            "Does Lily know?" I asked. McGonagall shook her head, saying that she was about to tell us both. "I'll tell her," I said, sounding braver than I felt. 

            "Thank you," McGonagall said shortly. She bustled off hurriedly, looking as though she could not take another minute of the conversation. 

            I slowly climbed the stairs. I felt as though someone was wrenching my heart like a dishrag. I climbed through the portrait hole. She was sitting in an old chair, reading a book by the fire. She looked up when she heard me come in.

            "Sirius! Where were you? I was getting worried; I thought you might have run into one of the professors."

            Only then did she notice the look on my face. "What's wrong?" she asked, her eyes glimmering in the firelight. When I didn't answer, she stood up, walking towards me. "What happened?" she repeated.

            "Lil, it was Voldemort, he- he came to your house, and-" But she knew. I didn't even have to finish. 

            She was silent. For a moment, I thought that she was going to be sick. Her face had paled and she shaking her head, as though trying to believe that it was a horrible dream. 

            "No," she murmured. "No! Why did he kill them? TELL ME WHY HE KILLED THEM!" she screamed, pounding my chest with her clenched fists. I just stood there, looking helplessly at her. I waited until all of her anger was spent, and she crumpled into my arms, sobbing.

            I've never been sure for just how long we sat on the floor, holding onto all that we had left. It must have been early in the morning, because I remember seeing the colors of the sunrise stream in through the windows, casting shadows around us. It's a wonder no one ever came to check on us, to make sure we hadn't leapt from a window ledge, or run away to seek revenge, or other nonsense. But perhaps that was because they knew. They knew what we needed, and it wasn't a quick death or spilled blood. All we needed was each other. 

            For the rest of the day we slept, stretched out on the sofa, as I held her close to me. Or rather, _she_ slept. I was awake most of the time, watching her, her head resting on my chest. Sometimes she had nightmares. She murmured her fears, begging not to be left alone. I stroked her hair, whispering softly that I would never leave her. And I never did. 

            There were better times, there had to be. When your life is filled with trials, you always have to have something to struggle through them for. We never lost sight of the times we were happy, when we could have ruled the world. 

            Later in seventh year, February perhaps, I remember clearly a conversation we had. We were talking a walk on the grounds, and a light snow was falling on the already blanketed ground. 

            "Have you heard from Dumbledore about what's to happen next?" she asked, looking ahead at the bleak skyline.

            "Not a word," I replied, "which could either mean we're winning, or that in the next few days we are all going to die untimely deaths. Take your pick."

            "I think that if we were going to die, we would have been given some warning." Lily said.

            "What for?"

            She rolled her eyes. "If you knew that someone was going to die, wouldn't you want to inform them before the fact?"

            I considered this for a moment. "Not if that someone happened to be us."

            She grinned. "And why not?"

            "Because it might very well be a false alarm. And we'd be bumbling around like headless chickens, saying goodbye and signing our wills, and-" I paused, seeing the way she was looking at me. "-and doing.. desperate, emotional things. Things we would regret."

            She stopped, turning to face me. "Like what?" she said softly.

            "Like this."

            I kissed her, holding her face gently in my hands. I felt her move closer. It seemed an eternity before we moved apart.

            "Someone could have seen that." She said matter-of-factly, shoving her hands into her pockets. She looked quite amused.

            "So what? We're probably going to die anyway."

            She grinned at my words, shaking her head. "You're positively hopeless."

            "And you're positively gorgeous."

            She stopped again. "Sirius, you know that you and I, we could never-"

            "I know."

            "But I still love you." She said, taking my hands in hers. "Never forget that."

            "I love you, too, Lily."

            We walked a little while longer, before stopping by the greenhouse. "Well, I've got to get to Arithmancy." She said, gesturing towards the tower near the greenhouse.

            "And I've got Divination up in the North Tower." I said. "I'll see you later."

            She gazed into my eyes for a long time before replying. "Right. See you."

            I turned and began to walk in the opposite direction, though I did not hear her footsteps moving along their path. Seconds, later, she called out. 

            "Sirius!"

            "Hmm?" I said, turning around and walking backwards.

            "You think Dumbledore knows anything?"

            "I suppose we'll find out."

            "They're going to kill us."

            I shrugged. "They can try." I said, with a cocky grin.

            She looked towards the sky, shaking her head in disbelief and laughing. And we both walked to our respective classes, alone and left with our own thoughts.

            And I suppose we were right all along. We were as doomed as we had always feared. I know I'll go down fighting, just like she did. There would be no deathbed, no final requests. No peaceful final moment surrounded by family and friends. We would die alone, surrounded by nothing but the blood that had already been spilled. 

            There was a reason our lives were complicated. We both loved James. We would give our lives for him in an instant, no questions asked. You could never say anything that would cause us to abandon him. 

            But he loved Lily, and Lily loved him back. It makes no sense, when I think about it. She loved us both. How can you bestow the innermost passion in your heart upon more than one person? But somehow she did. And she stayed with James, loved him, married him, because it was the right thing to do. 

            That's precisely why I hardly ever felt any guilt over the relationship that I did have with Lily. Had it been revealed, it would have destroyed James. We loved him too much for that. No, it was far better for him to be in blissful ignorance than to be broken beyond repair. And it's not as though Lily didn't love him. There was no infidelity in her heart. But no matter what, there was always something unshakable between us. Something that even we would never truly understand. And it killed us to know that there would be a point at which we would have to leave it behind. Leave it behind because there was something more important. 

Lily and James were engaged when they were only eighteen years old. Imagine having your life set before you so early; somehow it was never a problem for either of them.  But I suppose it was, in all actuality, quite timely. They were to die when they were twenty-one; had they married but a year later they would only have had only months together. Certainly not enough time to have a son.

Things were unusually tense between Lily and I in the months before the wedding. Not because we didn't always know that there would be a day when we would have to let go, of course. But it wouldn't be like the thousands of times when we would shake our heads hopelessly and say, "We _have_ to stop doing this." This time we would mean it. We would have to do the right thing. If only what was right was more like what was easy. 

It was the night of the rehearsal dinner. Everything had gone surprisingly well, so well in fact that we only had to run through the major parts once or twice. Soon everything was tidied up and laid out, waiting for tomorrow morning. 

James' family (or rather, his mother) wanted him to be at home with them that night. I don't think that they were entirely comfortable with the idea that he was going to be married at nineteen, and perhaps they wanted a final night with him as their child. Whatever the case, they dragged him away at the end. He looked almost pained as he said goodbye to Lily, so eager for their next meeting to arrive. I knew exactly how he felt. 

Soon it was only Lily and I, standing in the towering church, every word we said echoing off the stone ceiling and the marble pillars. I offered to give her a ride home. And when I say "ride", I do mean a car. I'd always loved Muggle transportation, my first favorite being my motorcycle. I had found a car, an old, beat-up red convertible, in a junkyard. With a little magic, it looked as though it had just left the showroom floor. It was a slow way of getting around, but I'd always delight in having time to do nothing but talk to whoever happened to be with me. 

Lily and I drove in silence that night. I can't remember a time when that had ever happened before; car rides were our time to talk about anything and everything. I desperately wanted to know what she was thinking. She just gazed out the window, the yellow of the streetlamps floating across her face. But something told me that I should keep quiet until she chose to break the silence.

We arrived at her house, a cozy cottage in a quiet neighborhood that used to belong to her parents. Against my better judgment, I took her up on her offer to come inside for some tea. I leaned against a wall in her kitchen as she set the kettle on the stove. The lull in conversation was getting tiresome.

"Are you excited for tomorrow?" I asked.

"Excited, but nervous as well. I'm awful at remembering things; I'll probably lose my voice halfway through. Wouldn't that be wretched?"

"I doubt that'll happen. Adrenaline will take over, you'll see. You won't miss a beat."

"I hope so." She put down the spoon that was in her hand, turning around to face me. "Are you going to be okay?" 

I shrugged, pretending that I didn't know what she was talking about. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Because I'm getting married tomorrow."

"Yes, and?"

"You don't have to be strong for me, you know. I know as well as you do that this is going to be hard, and I for one am-" she faltered. "I'm so torn inside that I don't know what I'm doing anymore!" she turned her back to me again, fiddling with something on the stove.

"It's not that difficult. You love James, and James loves you. Ergo, you're going to be married."

She spun around. I saw that there were tears in her eyes. "Don't you dare try to downplay this. You know how I feel about you. You know why this is difficult."

"But it doesn't have to be," I said, moving towards her. "Look, Lils, I know that we've always had something between us. If it's love-"

"Of course it's love. What else would it be?" she said sternly, searching my eyes.

"I don't know. But you cannot hang onto it. For as long as I can remember, you've never been just my best friend. I've always loved you much more than that. And when you walk down that bloody aisle tomorrow and tell James that you will be his for the rest of your life, of course I'll be thinking about what could have been. But what could have been is far from what should be. What should be is a happy life between you and James, because you love each other. It's love that's professed, and faithful, and undying. Aren't you tired of sneaking around with me, always coming up with new ways to deny whatever we happen to be feeling? You deserve so much better than that."

"Maybe I don't want something better. Maybe I'm perfectly fine where I am." She said defiantly.

"Oh, you'd stay with me, you mean? You'd choose me over James? You would watch his heart break, destroy him entirely, and know that we were the cause of it? I highly doubt that."

I hated fighting with Lily. Especially about us. No one ever won, really. It always came down to a truce, or a decision to drop the argument where it was and never pick it up again. But that couldn't be done this time. In twenty-four hours she would be lost to me for good, and I refused to let anything remain unsaid.

"No, you're right. I wouldn't do that. But I will not forget about you, either. I hate this as much as you do. I wish I had never met either one of you. I wish I were a Muggle, in fact. Then I wouldn't be involved in this stupid war, or have gone to our stupid school, and I wouldn't have fallen in stupid love with either one of you!" she spat.

"Do you mean that?" I asked. It wasn't a particularly hurtful thing of her to say, but it made me curious. Would she prefer to never have gotten that letter before first year? And is it my fault?

She softened. "No, I don't. Of course I don't, I just wish-" she seemed to be searching for a way to phrase whatever she was about to say next. "I wish it could be simpler. That's all."

"Oh. Alright, then."

She looked at me, puzzled. "What do you mean, 'alright then'? Don't you wish that things had turned out differently?"

I shrugged. "Depends on which things, exactly. Some things I wouldn't change. I would have never changed the fact that I'd met you, or James for that matter. I wouldn't change the fact that I love you, because I can't imagine a life without it. So I don't know what I'd change."

            "I suppose you're right." She said, turning back to the teakettle. But I still had so much more that I had to say before this night ended. I wasn't about to stop now.

            "What will happen after your married? Will we just move on? I mean, you've been more or less cheating on James for how long now?"  
  


            Once again, Lily looked exasperated. "Don't say it like that. I love James." 

            "Then why are you always running to me?" 

            "Because I can't stop!" she cried, her eyes welling up once more with tears. "I. Can't. Stop. I have always loved you, I always will love you, no matter who else I happen to meet. That's how I've always rationalized all of this. Maybe, just maybe, I could get you out of my head. Maybe we would tire of each other, and then I could devote my heart solely to James for the rest of eternity. But now I know that it doesn't work that way. Like I said, I will always love you.  That will never go away. It's more or less carved in my bloody soul. My only hope now is that by tomorrow morning, I will have been able to get everything I feel out. Start over. Put everything where it belongs."

            "For James," I said softly, my head feeling as though a deep fog had settled.

            "Yes," she whispered, tears falling down her cheeks. "For James. Because I love him, and I want to spend the rest of my life with him."

            "If James weren't here, would things be different?" I asked, already knowing the weight of the question that I had asked.

            "Maybe. Maybe not. I don't really know." She answered. 

            Slowly I began to understand. She loved James. But there would always be something between us, and her only request was that we get it out of our systems. She would never stop loving me. But she had to give her heart to James tomorrow. And she didn't want to do that while thinking about what we've had together. Because tonight, that became the past. 

            Somehow, it all made me feel more anger than anything ever had before in my life.

            "What did we do to deserve this? Why do we have to go through this? For Chrissakes, why do bad things happen to good people? Are we even good people? Or are we so horribly jaded that there's no going back? Why us, Lily? What, in the whole of the universe, incurred-"

"Sirius!" 

"What?"

"Shut up."

            And before I even knew what was happening, we were locked in a kiss. I could feel the desperation between us in every move that we made, the hunger that seemed to emanate.

            The tea was forgotten. We stumbled out of the room, still kissing more passionately than I can remember ever kissing anyone in my life. I could feel her heart beating more quickly, her hands sliding towards the back of my neck, raking her fingers through my hair. She fell back against the wall, the kiss growing fiercer, more desperate.  

Soon we had stumbled into Lily's bedroom. We fell down onto the edge of her bed, her body sinking into the pure white quilts beneath me. We parted for a moment, trying to catch our breath.

            "We can stop this now," I whispered, still breathing heavily. "We can honestly say this never happened." 

            She looked into my eyes. I saw that hers were more brilliantly green than ever before, glimmering with fresh tears. 

            "No," she said, equally as breathless, "I don't think that we can."

~~~~~

            The sun flowed in from the windows, dimmed only by thin white curtains that blew in the May breeze. Morning. I looked down, seeing Lily still resting in my arms, her eyelashes brushing against my neck.

            In that moment, I felt completely and utterly at peace. I had forgotten about everything; James, the wedding, the war. It all felt so distant, so removed from the perfection I felt. I stroked her cheek gently, weaving my fingers in and out of her fiery red hair. Slowly her eyes fluttered open. She looked up at me and smiled softly, closing her eyes again and settling in closer to me. The cool breeze blowing through the room nicely contrasted the warmth of her body against mine. I kissed her forehead, leaning my head on hers and closing my eyes as well, wishing too to savor every last moment of this.

            We didn't speak that whole morning. We didn't have to. For once there was nothing more to say. We cried, knowing that it was the end. And we smiled, knowing that there never truly was such a thing. But mostly we just lay there, holding each other like we had so many times before, drowning in soft kisses.

            People rarely remember what will only ail them. But every time I looked at Lily I remembered every moment of every day. When she gave birth to James' child, when I held her in my arms as her life slipped away, when I looked at her picture in old albums I had thought to be lost, I always remembered. Because while it causes me the deepest pain, I have never known misery so sweet. 

~~~

**~*End*~**


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